Availability of InfiniBand Trade Association Spec Volume 1 Release 1.6

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) announced the availability of the IBTA Specification Volume 1 Release 1.6, which adds support for large radix switches, enabling dense data center infrastructures with a decrease in overall infrastructure and power costs.

The 1.6 spec enables the build out of 256-port top-of-rack (ToR) switches, up from 64-ports. When compared to a traditional 256-port non-blocking fat-tree topology, data centers utilizing new 256-port ToR switches will be enabled with significant OPEX and CAPEX reductions: 2x less cables, 12x less switches, with 1/3 the number of switch hops, reducing overall latency.

Additional features in the 1.6 specification include extended OpCodes for generalized transport function classes, as well as for enhanced Memory Placement Extensions (MPE) that will further reduce latency in distributed memory applications.

“Volume 1 Release 1.6 includes two major updates, one of which is the support for large radix switches, enabling significant cost and power reduction. The other significant addition is the new MPE Verify Operation which provides data verification without the need for ULP techniques. By utilizing the responder to perform the verification of remotely written data, the task is offloaded from the requestor and the network which in turn reduces latency, improves bandwidth usage and prevents pipeline stalls while the data is verified. These features make the Volume 1 Release 1.6 an important new release which furthers the advantages provided by both InfiniBand and RoCE RDMA Fabrics,” said Rupert Dance, chair, compliance and interoperability working group and co-chair, link working group, IBTA.

Resources:
Download IBTA Specification Volume 1 Release 1.6
Overview IBTA Specification Volume 1 Release 1.6